Something Unique, Or Not
by Higuchimon
Summary: [one-shot] If she can name one thing that she can do or has that they don't, they'll be her friends. Trouble is, they know a lot of people.


**Disclaimer:** I do not own any of the characters presented here and am not making any profit off of this whatsoever.  
**Title:** Something Unique, Or Not  
**Word Count:** 2,538  
**Rated:** PG-13  
**Focus:** ...Actually, I think you should read it. It's a bit hard to describe without spoiling the fun.  
**Notes:** This takes place during a hypothetical week after the defeat of Goat!Darkness and before the graduation party itself. Johan and O'Brian are still there too.  
**Summary:** If she can name one thing that she can do or has that they don't, they'll be her friends. Trouble is, they know a lot of people.

Ito Shiroi walked towards the group of people relaxing out in the sunshine. She was far more nervous than she wanted to admit, but she _wanted_ to be their friend. It was nearly the end of the school year, but even if she could just spend those last few days as part of them, it would thrill her soul. If only she'd had the nerve to approach them earlier…

But all of that was done and over with, and she wanted them to know all of the little secrets that had pestered her over the last three years. There was no one at Duel Academia who had _ever_ had to deal with any of the problems that she had, and she just wanted to have someone she could talk to about them all.

"Hello…" Shiroi spoke the words a little nervously as she drew to a stop. Juudai lifted his head and looked at her; her stomach bounced and jounced joyously at the sight of him. He was just so gorgeous. She didn't really understand some of the rumors she'd heard, but they didn't matter. What mattered was getting close to them all for what little time she could.

"You're Ito Shiroi, right?" It was Tenjoin Fubuki who asked that, and she blushed just at the sound of his voice. To think that the great Wizard of Love knew her name…all she could do was nod a bit helplessly. "Something that we can help you with?" Oh, she hoped so! She so hoped so!

"I was wondering…could I be your friend?" That sounded so stupid now that she heard herself say it. "I'm going to graduate soon, and I've hardly made any friends here at all. No one ever seems to understand me or want to talk to me, and you're all so nice…"

Manjoume snorted some but she hadn't expected a great deal of help from _him_. She kept on talking. "There's been so much that I wanted to talk to people about, and they always ignore me…but I know you wouldn't." This just kept sounding stupider, but she couldn't help herself. What _else_ could she say or do?

Juudai started to sit up more, tilting his head a bit to look at her. There was something so amazingly special about him, beyond how good he looked. She'd heard a lot of scary stories about things that had happened earlier in the year, but she didn't want to believe most of them. There was no way that he could have ever hurt someone else, when he'd always been a hero. Since she'd heard it all third and fourth hand, it had probably gotten too garbled to even think about believing.

Before he could say anything, she kept on going. This was it! "I know you don't hang out with just anyone." She waved a hand at the group of people, all of them special in some way. "But I'm special too!" Oh, God, that really did sound stupid! What had made her decide to do this? But…she couldn't back down now.

"That doesn't matter," Juudai said, straightening himself up some. He was just trying to be nice, of course. She'd seen this kind of thing back in the school she'd went to before here. "You don't have to be special to be our friend, you know."

Yeah, he was just trying to be nice. But she could see the truth in who was gathered there. So, she'd prove that she deserved to be one of them, no matter how silly it made her feel. "I'm …I've never told anyone else this. My mom told me that my dad…wasn't human." She'd never met her dad, actually, and her mom had said something more along the lines of she wished that she remembered more about the one-night stand than the fact it had been virtually inhuman. "So…I'm not entirely human."

"Really?" Kenzan grinned over at her, and she wondered for a moment how someone could have all of those _teeth_ and still look human. "Me neither! What're you?"

"Uhh…" Shiroi fidgeted a little; that wasn't a question that she'd been prepared to deal with. They were supposed to be in awe or maybe even a little nervous, not telling her that there was someone else like that! How many part humans could there be, after all? "I…"

"Tell you what." Manjoume had been sorting through his deck and now he turned to look at her. "You think you need to be special, huh? If you can find something that you have that we don't or that we don't know someone who has it, then you can be our friend." He laughed, as did everyone else. Shiroi wondered if he were making some kind of a joke, though it didn't really appear to be _mean_ laughter. More like they honestly thought this was funny somehow.

If that was how it was going to be, then so be it. She'd find a way to fit in with them and be special, just like they were! Since her first secret hadn't been all that impressive, she moved on to the next one. "I use more than one deck when I duel. And my main one is a special deck, I've never seen any of the cards used for it before."

"Johan's got a deck that was given to him by President Pegasus," Juudai said, his eyes flickering over to where Johan sat not too far from him. "I've used three or four decks. So has Manjoume. Misawa used to have _six_ decks."

"My deck is made up from my old Vehicroid deck and the dark Cyber deck!" Shou put in. She flushed a little at that; no one could have imagined that he would have come as far as he had.

"I've been working on a new deck of my own," Asuka also added. "Decks just evolve and change. That's how it's supposed to be."

Oh. She'd heard she'd heard Chronos-sensei say something about that, but with her own unique set of decks, she hadn't thought about it a lot, and she didn't like listening to him anyway. Scratch that. At least Juudai hadn't offered to duel her. She thought she could win, but she'd seen him snatch victory from the jaws of defeat more than enough times not to be so certain about it. Of course, from the way he was looking at her and her deck holster, maybe he would eventually?

At any rate, she had to keep moving. She _would_ find something that made her unique! Her next little secret was something that had awakened her in the middle of the night more than once. She'd thought every year that this would be the year when it actually happened, and sometimes she thought it had, but then it happened to other people, _lots_ of other people, so it couldn't have been what she was expecting.

"I think there's someone who is trying to steal my soul. I've gotten really bad feelings a lot of the time, like someone's after me." She hadn't felt like that in a while, but that didn't mean it wasn't going to happen. Surely, _surely_ none of them had ever had someone who was going after them directly!

So why did they look like they all wanted to break out into hysterical laughter? Shiroi bit her lip as she looked from one of them to the other.

"Shiroi, didn't you notice everything that's been going on the last three years here?" Asuka asked gently. "There have been people going after everyone's soul, not just yours."

"And if you want to go specific, then _mine_ was sealed inside Rainbow Dragon for a while," Johan put in. "And then there's what happened with Yubel and Juudai."

Yubel? She'd heard that name floating around, but had never quite figured out who it was. She was about to ask when Juudai lightly shook his head. She couldn't tell what he was thinking about all of this. He could be inscrutable, she'd noticed. All things considered, that was part of the reason that everyone liked him so much. Including her. She did wish that he'd be more like he'd been before all that weird dimensional traveling had begun. That was when that name had started to drift around as well. So it was probably connected. Just how, she didn't know and doubted they'd tell her, at least not until she was one of them.

Perhaps the next thing would be it. After all, he wasn't seeing anyone, and he'd never appeared to be that interested in anyone. He'd probably thought that after all of his maturity, no one would want him, since they were so used to him _not_ being mature. You got used to people being one way. But she'd been more and more fascinated by him the more she'd seen of him and she'd never want him to go back. "I…Juudai, I really like you. I think I could be…"

"Hold it right there." The voice came from behind her and she turned to see that odd girl, Saotome Rei. What was _she_ doing there? And what could she want?

The first year put her hands on what would be hips once she got around to finishing puberty and glared at Shiori. "If you're trying to say that you're in love with Juudai-sama, then you're _certainly_ not the only one!"

Manjoume snorted briefly. "It would be harder to find someone who _doesn't_." His eyes shot to an empty space a little to his left and he muttered something that Shiroi couldn't quite hear but which sound very, very profane.

Well, she wasn't even going to keep trying in that vein. But that was hardly the end of her secrets. There were still a couple of other things that she could try. There just had to be _something_. Really! "I can see duel spirits!" Granted, she wasn't all that good at it, but she had the occasional moment when she could see her Mystic Tomato partner.

Somehow, she couldn't bring herself to be that surprised when Juudai, Johan, and Manjoume all raised their hands. "Would you like to take some of those annoying things in _my_ deck off of my hands?" Manjoume asked, then looked again at that blank spot. "No, not you. I couldn't _pay_ someone to take you."

"Um…no…" Shiroi shook her head, doubting that Manjoume really meant that seriously anyway. There were still two other things, the smallest and least significant, but _surely_ one of them would be good enough. No matter what they said, she just wasn't going to believe that she didn't have to be special. Just _look_ at them all. Shou was brother to the illustrious Hell Kaiser, with whom he was making such incredible plans for their future. Asuka was the greatest female duelist there. Manjoume was rich and good-looking and was able to win with a deck stuffed full of _Ojamas_ and had won the Genex tournament and had apprenticed to Edo Phoenix and was going into the Pro Leagues! Fubuki was beyond gorgeous and there was just so much mystery about his disappearance and return!

Kenzan was almost certainly going to be the next leader of the school; she'd heard Momoe and Junko babbling about that a few days ago. And if he really was part dinosaur, that just made her point all the stronger. Johan had been given a special deck by Pegasus himself, and he and Juudai had had some kind of weird attachment since the moment that they'd met. O'Brian was the champion of his school and he was even stranger and more mysterious than Fubuki. He had sat to the back of the group all of this time, polishing his duel disk and not even looking at her.

And Juudai…oh, Juudai. She couldn't go into enough details on him. But there was no one there who was _ordinary_. Even that new guy, Fujiwara, was a little strange. She hadn't heard much about him, other than the fact he, Fubuki, and Hell Kaiser had known each other for a long time. He'd had something to do with all those weird things that had happened a few days before as well.

These were her last chances. She took in a deep breath. "Sometimes I've dreamed the future." It wasn't very clear and it wasn't always accurate, but once or twice, she'd dreamed things that had later happened. Once she'd dreamed of going over a waterfall in a log, and three years later, she and her mother had done that when they'd went to one of the rides at an amusement park.

"I have a feeling if we called up Saioh and Mizuchi, they would say that you would have said that," Asuka said, her lips twitching slightly. "Juudai's right, you know. You don't have to be 'special' to be our friend. Or to be anyone's friend."

Shiroi stamped her foot, getting suddenly angry. "Is there anything that you people haven't seen?" she demanded sharply. How was she supposed to be their friend like this? This was not how things were supposed to happen. She was _supposed_ to awe them with her talents and skills, so unlike anyone else they had ever met, and they were acting as if she wasn't special or unique in the slightest! How could they even _want_ to hang out with someone who was just _ordinary_?

But she was ready with her last secret, the one that would blow them all out of the water and admit her into this wonderful circle of friends. "I do all of my homework as soon as it's assigned!" Juudai virtually never did his! This would be shocking! She could even help him get his grades up!

"Misawa would do his homework _before_ it was assigned." Shou said with a slight hint of nostalgia in his voice. "All the time."

Shiori stared for a moment, hardly able to believe what she was hearing. Then she drooped. It was over. She had nothing else. They'd told her no so very clearly and she hadn't wanted to hear it. She was useless. "Oh. Well. Okay." Really, what had she been thinking? To think that someone like her could hang out with the coolest and most elite crowd in Duel Academia? No. It would never be.

She turned and walked away without another word. Behind her, she could still hear them talking for a while.

"That was really weird." That was Johan.

"I wonder why she didn't believe us." Asuka sounded more than a little confused.

"I can't believe she actually _fell_ for that 'find something we can't do' thing." Manjoume openly snorted. "What an idiot."

Shiroi could not bring herself to believe that he was wrong. She sighed and petted Mystic Tomato as it trilled on her shoulder. "We'll find some friends someday, boy. I promise. Ones who will appreciate us." And she kept on walking.

**The End**


End file.
